Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  My parents had to make a choice. Kona Coast wasn’t finished, but the school year was starting. They had learned enough about Hawaii by then to know that public schools weren’t such a hot option, particularly not for high school, which I was now entering. We would head back to the mainland in time to start school there.

  On cue, my surfboard was stolen again. My combination lock, cut through by hacksaw, lay in the sand by my locker. Clearly the thief had known we were leaving. This time I did involve my parents. But time was short, and no one knew anything. Both Dougie and Cippy were away, sorry. Their families weren’t sure about their plans. And so we flew back to the mainland minus one key piece of luggage.

  My parents loaned me the down payment for a new Harbour Cheater, which would be identical to the stolen board, right down to the yellow tint. I went to work pulling weeds for a neighbor, at a dollar an hour, after school. With tax, the board would be $135. I figured I could have the money by November.

  With my mother, Santa Monica, 1953

  TWO

  SMELL THE OCEAN

  California, ca. 1956–65

  I WAS IN LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA, A FEW YEARS AGO, DRIVING south in a rental car down the main street, Pacific Coast Highway. It was foggy, damp, deserted, ocean to my right, its midnight smell, the aqueous lights of businesses closed for the night flanking the road. I was tired, but not unalert. Passing an old, decrepit-looking motel, I heard a horrible cry. I knew what it was: a memory, not a crime or a heartbeak in progress. But the rawness of the remembered shriek made my scalp prickle. It was my father, as a young man. He had dislocated his shoulder in that motel, playing with me in an indoor pool. It was the first indoor pool I had seen. It was the first time I had heard my dad cry out in pain. He never cursed or complained when he got cuts, scratches, bruises. Indeed, he usually laughed. So this was bad—terrifying, really, for me. He was helpless, desperate. My mother was called. An ambulance came. What were we doing in a motel in Laguna? I don’t know. We had friends in Newport Beach, the next town north, not Laguna. I was four at the most—still in that purported Eden before siblings.

  Dad’s shoulder continued to dislocate every few years. The last time it happened, he was out at the Bomb. He didn’t surf, so what was he doing, on a surfboard, out at the Bomb? Apparently he paddled out just to have a look, to see big waves at close range. Then a set closed out the channel. He lost the board. And his shoulder came out of its socket. He went down once, twice, couldn’t stay afloat. A Hawaiian surfer saved him. I wasn’t there. I was in exile then, a college dropout. At the hospital, they opened up his shoulder, repaired the capsule, and tightened the surrounding muscles. It would not dislocate again. Neither would he be able to raise his arm above his head. Decades later, driving south through Laguna, I found myself hoping that my daughter, then four, never heard me bellow helplessly.

  • • •

  WE LIVED FAR from the coast when I was small. I was not a beach kid. How, then, did surfing become the tumbling center of my tender years? Let me take you down some of the alleyways where the great wet driving reverb of the surf guitar first found me.

  There were the Beckets. They were ocean people. They were the family friends who lived in Newport Beach, which is an old fishing and yachting town fifty miles south of Los Angeles. They had six kids, and the oldest, Bill, was exactly my age. Family photos show the two of us as infants, on our bellies at the beach, each fascinated by sand. My mother said the adults, all new to parenthood, gave us orders, “Play!” Behind us, lounging in period bathing suits, our impossibly young parents throw back their heads and laugh. I can still hear Coke Becket’s big, cascading chortle. She and my mother had knocked around together before they were married, working as maids in Yosemite Park and, for reasons they could never precisely recall, as secretaries in Salem, Oregon.

  Big Bill Becket was a fireman. He kept hundreds of lobster traps in their backyard, and on calm days he set them from his dory on certain rock reefs off the Orange County coast. Little Bill quickly acquired four sisters and then a brother. The Beckets were more hard-core Catholics than we were. They bought a little two-story shingled saltbox on Balboa Peninsula, a densely built finger of sand that ran between the ocean and Newport Bay. Their street, 34th, was three blocks long, ocean to bay-channel. We tried to rent a cottage for a week each summer, usually on the bay side, where it was cheaper.

  I started staying with the Beckets from a young age. Little Bill and I fished with handlines for smelt, filled buckets with crabs and clams, borrowed an ancient paddleboard from his dad to explore the maze of bay-channels, paddling tandem out past Lido Island into the open waters of Newport Bay. We commandeered a tiny sailboat and beached it on a barren, sandy island near the highway, claiming the land for ourselves and fighting off other kids who tried to land there. In late afternoon, trapped by a sea breeze against the highway bridge, which was lower than our mast, we tacked frantically back and forth, losing ground each tack, finally tying up on the last possible private dock.

  Mainly, we bodysurfed in the waves off 34th Street. That was our home base, a universe complete: the cold blue ocean, the hot white sand, the crashing south swells.

  Little Bill had a closet-sized room, with barely enough space for a single bed, and we slept in it heading opposite directions, kicking each other in the face. We showered together, even peed together, snickering swordsmen crossing our streams in toilet-bowl battle. He was a true beach kid, with a crew cut bleached white by sun, feet with soles like wood, and a back that in summer went black as tar. He knew what the tide was doing at any moment, no matter where we were, as if he could smell it on the air. He knew when the grunion were running—mysterious fish that washed up in the shorebreak to spawn, but only at night, an hour after high tide, and only in certain months and certain phases of the moon. With a flashlight, you could fill a gunnysack with grunion in an hour. Floured and deep-fried, they were considered a delicacy. Walking on Newport Pier, Bill poked around in the buckets of fishermen without permission, putting them at their ease with offhand, wharf-rat encouragement. “Nice corbina.”

  Bill, like his father, prided himself on being unflappable. He was sardonic, almost aggressively relaxed—the essential California oxymoron. From an early age, he had a cracker-barrel expression for every occasion. Becket was never simply busy—he was always “busier ’n a one-armed paperhanger” or “busier ’n a bad raccoon.” He could be overbearing. He tried to order his sisters around, with mixed results. They met his imperiousness with sarcasm, and there were four of them, each the proud little owner of an acid wit. The Beckets’ house overflowed with full-time residents, and yet it somehow doubled as a community center. There were always neighbors in and out, platters of tacos arriving from the kitchen, someone barbecuing fresh-caught fish in the backyard, live lobsters going in the pot. Among the adults, the wine and beer and liquor flowed.

  Coke Becket played the accordion, and the family songbook was prodigious. Even the little kids could belt out “Remember Me,” “She’s More to Be Pitied,” “Sentimental Journey,” and “Please Don’t Sell My Daddy No More Wine.” A vein of showmanship ran through the clan. Coke’s mother, Ardie, who lived off in the hills somewhere, showed up one afternoon on 34th Street, but not in a car, as my grandmother would have. She had instead parked her truck and horse trailer around the corner and arrived on 34th Street standing, in a tight beaded buckskin costume and a feathered headdress, on the back of a horse. She paraded up the street, waving serenely at the people popping out of houses. The Becket kids were excited to see her, but not amazed by the circus entrance. They had seen it many times.

  Big Bill came from downtown Los Angeles. He was part of a loose group of young guys who had made their way to the coast south of the city after the war. He was wry and intense, slow-talking, good-looking, with basset-hound eyes and a deep tan. Good with his hands, he could build a seaworthy boat from a pile of lumber. He surfed. He playe
d the ukulele. In fact, he and Coke had gotten married in Hawaii. Big Bill had carved the coffee table in their tiny upstairs living room out of his own old redwood surfboard. It was teardrop-shaped, heavy as lead. Little Bill and I liked to visit his dad at the firehouse, where he was a captain. He seemed to be always out behind the station, working on a boat, putting on another coat of varnish in the sun.

  Little Bill had not just chores but real jobs. At dawn he baited hooks for the dory fishermen at the pier. It was nasty work, pressing stinking anchovies onto rusty barbs fixed every couple of feet on eighteen-hundred-foot coils of line, $2.50 for six hundred hooks, but he could finish by midmorning with some help, so I would go along, and both our hands would stink all day. One summer he had a job at a place called Henry’s, also by the pier, renting hard rafts to tourists. They were wonderful rafts, and Becket’s friends and I would help ourselves to the stock, risking his job. The rafts were heavy canvas, with heavy yellow rubber ends, and so hard you could almost ride them standing up. Styrofoam bellyboards were popular, but Henry’s rafts were faster and more maneuverable.

  Surfboards were also around, but in Newport their use was restricted to designated areas and early mornings only, at least in summer. More to the point, boardsurfing was intimidating. It was for big guys, we believed, not us. We saw surfers around town. They had sun-bleached hair, drove old station wagons, wore plaid Pendleton shirts, white jeans, huaraches—Mexican sandals with soles made from old car tires—and they rioted, we heard, on weekend nights way down the peninsula at the Rendezvous Ballroom, where Dick Dale and the Del-Tones played seductive, subversive music.

  Becket lost his job at Henry’s not because of our unauthorized rentals but because he got bored one afternoon waiting for a tourist kid who was just lying with his raft on the beach. It was the only raft still out. Becket wanted to close up the stand. We were all waiting around. The tourist kid, who was pale and plump, seemed to be asleep. Finally, one of Becket’s buddies produced a slingshot. Becket, loading up a pebble, nailed the torpid customer on an exposed flank. The boy cried much louder than seemed warranted. We fled. The boy’s mother, to our astonishment, called the cops. From our hiding places, we watched Becket’s little tennis-ball head ride away in the backseat of a police car. Henry fired him, and Becket’s friends started calling him JB, for Jailbird. Not that he—son of a popular fire captain—spent a minute in a cell.

  First Communion class, St. Mel Catholic Church, Woodland Hills, 1960 (author, third row, third from right)

  Becket’s friends were all Catholics. They even went to Catholic schools. The older ones were on their way to becoming altar boys. They rode their bikes to Sunday Mass, and swaggered around like they owned the church grounds. I was impressed and ashamed, thinking of my timid Sunday visits to St. Mel’s, our church at home, always with my parents. The Newport boys showed me how to sneak into the balcony at the back of the church, where the choir sang at High Mass, and we watched the service from up there. This required a lot of hiding in the pews so that the priest, on the altar, would not spot us when he turned to the congregation. It was tricky because my companions very much wanted to catch the eyes of their friends who were serving as altar boys, to try to make them laugh. I was agog at all this mischief, then mortified when a redheaded kid named Mackie hissed at me to shut up—I had apparently, after the priest intoned, “Dominus vobiscum,” been murmuring, out of habit, “Et cum spiritu tuo.” Growing bored, a couple of boys started silently spitting on the parishioners below us, leaping back to hide after each thick loogie, as we called them, was dropped. Now I was truly scandalized. Did these boys not believe in hell? They did not, as was made clear to me in jeering conversation out on the oceanfront after Mass. I still did, though, and I was horrified by what I had seen that morning—genuinely, religiously afraid. Evidently it took Catholic school to turn young kids into fearless, hardened apostates. I was a public school wimp, still cowed by nuns.

  • • •

  I LOVED NEWPORT, but I loved San Onofre more. It was forty miles farther south, a little patch of undeveloped shore surrounded by a big Marine base. The Beckets stuffed their Volkswagen bus full of kids and gear and headed down there on weekends. San Onofre had been one of the early outposts of California surfing, and the dedicated beach bums who camped there to surf and fish and hunt abalone had somehow convinced the military to let them keep going in after the base was built. There was a dirt road to the coast blocked by a guardhouse, but members of the San Onofre Surfing Club were allowed through. Big Bill was a founding member. The beach was nothing special—narrow and treeless, rocky beyond the water’s edge—but the families who camped there shared the place with a palpable, low-key pleasure. Many of them seemed to have PhDs in having fun. Surfboards, fishing rods, snorkel gear, old sea kayaks, inflatables—everything pointed toward the water. Panel vans with faded awnings and tiki huts built from driftwood provided patches of shade. Bridge tournaments and volleyball gave way, after sundown, to bonfires and hootenannies, and martinis were legal tender.

  Then there were the waves. San Onofre’s waves were passé by the ’60s, when I came along—too slow, too mushy. In surfing’s early modern era, however, when boards were huge, very heavy, and generally did not have fins, riding straight toward shore with a minimum of turning was the preferred (indeed, the only possible) technique, and San Onofre offered perhaps the best wave in California for that style of surfing. The rides were long and smooth, with enough rock-reef variety to keep them interesting. Many of the surfers who went on to modernize board design after World War II cut their teeth at San Onofre—it was the Waikiki of the West Coast, minus the hotels and hoopla. And it remained an excellent place to learn to surf.

  I rode my first waves standing up there, on a borrowed green board, one summer day when I was ten. I don’t recall anyone giving me instructions. There were other people out, but San Onofre is a roomy spot. I paddled out alone, bowing my head and hanging on through gentle, silvery lines of whitewater. I watched other surfers riding by. It was monkey see, monkey do. I turned the board toward shore. The waves were nothing like the thumping beachbreaks that I had been bodysurfing for years. But the tide was low and the wind light, which made the approaching swells easy to read. I found a wide, crumbling, evenly crested wall and stroked like mad into the trough. The acceleration as the board, lifted, caught the wave, was less dramatic, less violent than catching waves at the beachbreaks on a raft or bodysurfing. But then the sensation, particularly a feeling of speed, of skipping across the water’s surface in front of the wave, just went on and on. This sense of weighty momentum was new. I wobbled to my feet. I remember looking to the side and seeing that the wave was not weakening, and looking ahead and seeing that my path was clear for a very long way, and then looking down and being transfixed by the rocky sea bottom streaming under my feet. The water was clear, slightly turquoise, shallow. But there was room for me to pass over safely. And so I did, again and again, that first day.

  • • •

  BUT I WAS, to my enduring shame, an inlander. Woodland Hills, where we lived, lay in the northwestern reaches of Los Angeles County. It was a world of dry hills—the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains—at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, which was a beige lake of smoggy subdivisions. My year-round friends didn’t know anything about the ocean. Their families had moved west from landlocked regions—Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Utah. Their fathers went to work in offices. Except Ricky Townsend’s dad, Chuck. He had an oil rig in the hills out toward Santa Paula. Ricky and I would go there with him. He wore a hard hat and filthy work shirts and big work gloves. His rig worked night and day, pumping and banging, and he was always fixing something. I figured the goal was a gusher, a sudden explosion of black gold. In the meantime, there wasn’t much for Ricky and me to do. The rig had a tower, with a little plywood-floored cab way up in the girders, and Mr. Townsend let us climb up there. So that was where Ricky and I sprawled around a t
ransistor radio, listening to Vin Scully call Dodgers games late into the night. Koufax and Drysdale were in their primes, striking out the world, and we thought that was normal.

  We lived in a cup of hills. And there was an insularity to our neighborhood, to my elementary school, an atavism that was reinforced by the topography. It felt like a small town, a hollow, and it was run by xenophobic hardheads. The John Birch Society was strong. My parents and their liberal, cosmopolitan friends were a minority—lovers of Adlai Stevenson in a Sam Yorty town. (Yorty was the mayor of L.A.—a tough, grinning, ignorant Red-baiter from Nebraska.) My parents subscribed to I.F. Stone’s Weekly and passionately supported the civil rights movement. They fought a local ballot measure that would allow housing owners to racially discriminate. NO ON 22, said the sign on our lawn. They lost. Woodland Hills Elementary remained 100 percent white.

  The best part about the hills was the hills. They were full of rattlesnakes, hobos, coyotes. They were where as boys we took long treks out past Mulholland Drive, which was still a dirt road then, to old shooting ranges and horse ranches. We had tree forts and rock forts scattered through the hills and canyons we claimed as ours, and we fought bands of boys from other hollows whom we met in unclaimed lands. More immediately, the hills were chutes. We swooped down them on bicycles, scraps of cardboard, rubber-wheeled Flexible Flyers (“From vine to vine the boys slid with lightning speed”), and, once they became available, skateboards. Even the paved streets, though, were absurdly steep. Ybarra Road was such a precipice that unwitting drivers stopped when they saw it, reversed, and sought alternate routes.

  • • •

  INTO THIS SMALL, bounded world, a dashing lad named Steve Painter rode. I first noticed him standing watching me beat up a classmate of mine. I was in the habit of inviting classmates home, strapping boxing gloves on them, and going a few rounds. What seems odd now is that we used to fight on a patch of grass right next to the sidewalk and the street. That patch was my boxing ring. I don’t think any part of the arrangement would be acceptable today. Then, however, nobody interfered with us. Boxing was what boys did. Steve Painter, after watching me knock my classmate around, quietly offered to put on the gloves. He was no bigger than me, so I confidently agreed. He beat me to my knees. It turned out he was three years older than me.